By Sr. Melissa Waters, OP
Dear, dear Students,
Our lives as the poet Robert Frost describes them, are journeys in which “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” And why? Because even with all our seemingly endless challenges, we do keep going from gold to gold, from gift to gift, from opportunity, from blessing to blessing! Look at your lives, dear ones, and as I get to say goodbye here I leave you with the gift of the words of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, hoping you will forever try to live by them.
Patient Trust
Above all, trust in the slow work of God. We are quite naturally impatient in everything to reach the end without delay. We should like to skip the intermediate stages. We are impatient of being on the way to something unknown, something new. And yet it is the law of all progress that it is made by passing through some stages of instability—and that it may take a very long time. And so I think it is with you; your ideas mature gradually—let them grow, let them shape themselves, without undue haste. Don’t try to force them on, as though you could be today what time (that is to say, grace and circumstances acting on your own good will) will make of you tomorrow.
Only God could say what this new spirit gradually forming within you will be. Give Our Lord the benefit of believing that his hand is leading you, and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself in suspense and incomplete.
